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  The footprints stopped ascending and shuffled off into one of the reading rooms. Krelyn looked up and made a mental note of the number on the grubby little sign that indicated the librarium level – seventy-three. She stared long and hard at the staircase that ran up to seventy-four, even running her hand lightly over the surface of the carpet. There was no sign that even a single foot had compressed that pile in recent days, or even recent years, reflected Krelyn.

  The prints led directly to the fourth reading room on level seventy-three, and Krelyn began to detect more agitation in the gait of the curator who had left them. As soon as she entered the reading room itself, the prints of the associated spies broke away from the main track, spraying out into different parts of the room as though scattered by an orderly explosion. Krelyn smiled at the neat organisation, as she realised that each of the spies had taken a different direction automatically, clearly fully aware of where the others would be and unwilling to tread on anyone’s toes. This kind of pattern suggested that there was a regular routine at work – after all, she herself had been watching Curator Tyranus for over four years, and the spies had been around for at least that long, presumably without bumping into each other.

  The curator’s wooden desk was still glowing with an excited pink imprint, suggesting that the man had been pretty agitated by something before he left it. There were hand prints all over the place – not all of them from the same hands. However, glowing brightest of all was the book on the desk, its paper having absorbed the sweaty attentions of all six of the night’s protagonists.

  Krelyn carefully picked up the stylus that had been laid across the cover of the book, placing it onto the desk with a faint clink. Then she picked up the book itself, turning it slowly in her hands in case there was something physically special about the tome. It felt like a normal book to her. Perhaps slightly heavier than a comparably sized volume made in recent years, but she was willing to believe that older technologies were heavier than modern ones. Paradoxes of the Spire looked older than most.

  The thermal prints on the pages stopped about half way through the text, so Krelyn was confident that nobody had read beyond that point. The first line on the last page to have been read caught her imagination: When you look up, there is nothing but the sky. In her mind’s eyes, this was the privileged view of House Helmawr – the only House in the spire without anything built above their glorious domain. To her, it sounded very boring up there.

  A noise made her start and turn her head back towards the stairs. Had she been followed? She froze, straining to hear. In her ear, she could just about discern the faint whirring of the aural implant that amplified and filtered sound; it was slightly faulty now and the whine of the device seemed to obliterate every other sound in the silence of the dark librarium.

  There were heavy, dragged footfalls, and she could also hear some wheezing. Whoever it was, they were not very fit. It was very unlikely that this was a dangerous pursuer, but it seemed equally unlikely that it would be some kind of menial, up here in the upper levels of the librarium.

  Krelyn closed the book quietly and returned it to the desk. She took a couple of steps towards the heavy darkness between two of the dustiest and least consulted-looking book stacks but then stopped. She hopped back to the desk and snatched up the stylus, placing it carefully across the cover of the book, just as she had found it.

  By the time Zefer staggered up to his desk and slouched down into his seat, Krelyn had retreated into the shadows to watch him, with her cloak wrapped around her like a death-shroud.

  He hadn’t been able to sleep. At first, the thought of the stealthy intruder had kept him awake, hidden behind the thick drapes around the bed waiting for silent death to come upon him. But his mind was a mess of activity, and he wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway. He had just laid there, twisting his body under the covers with each convoluted contortion of his brain, working himself into a fever and bringing on the prefigurings of a migraine.

  The words of the book had swum in and out of his mind, taunting him with their nonsense and goading him with the fact of his astonishing discovery. He might be the only curator of his generation to have discovered a new piece of authentic historical text. Its authenticity was beyond question, of course, since it was contained within the very pages of one of the most lauded volumes in the Ko’iron collection.

  And there was also the question of the stylus. Zefer had been torturing himself about having left the little device on top of the book. If there was anything that was going to draw people’s attention to that particular tome, he thought, it would be the unexpected and inexplicable appearance of a wayward stylus on its cover.

  He had thought that his careful positioning of the stylus would permit him to work out whether anyone tampered with the book whilst he was away – in much the same way as he had often left it sitting on his desk in the past. However, it gradually dawned on him that he didn’t want to know whether anyone else had tampered with the book, he simply wanted to make sure that nobody else looked at it at all.

  That was the realisation that had finally got Zefer Tyranus out of bed and stumbling urgently down the stairs of the Quake Tavern toward the librarium. As he entered his floor, he was breathing heavily and muttering to himself, rehearsing the now-obvious non-sequitur over and over again in his head: ‘Though it may be lost, salvation is always found… When you look up, there is nothing but the sky.’

  As he sat down at his desk and snatched up the stylus from the cover the book, Zefer wondered about that last sentence – the one that followed the newly discovered pages. As far as he could tell, it must be referring to one of two places. It was either a spatial reference to the House of Helmawr – since the only thing higher than the House of the Lord Guardians was the sky itself. Or, alternatively, it could be a temporal reference to a time before the hive had even existed – at such a time, there would be no hive to look up to, so when you looked up there would be nothing but sky, no matter who you were.

  Flipping through the pages to find the rough edges of the freshly torn paper that he had sliced earlier that night, Zefer found himself trembling with excitement about the possibilities contained in two entire sides of new, unread lines of the Paradoxes.

  He found the page and stuffed his nose down into it instantly, savouring the unusual smell of discovery. He recoiled slightly from the scent, snapping his head up out of the book and scrunching up his nose in appalled confusion. He paused for a moment and then sniffed again, just to make sure. There was no doubt: someone had touched the page since he was last there.

  Of course, he realised suddenly, casting his mind back to the moment when he had slumped back into his chair, the stylus had moved too. He had very deliberately left it diagonally across the top left-hand corner. When he had returned to the desk, it had been laying perpendicular to that corner – close to where he had left it, but not exactly in place.

  Zefer looked nervously over his shoulders and peered into the almost featureless darkness around him. He screwed up his eyes, looking for some variations in the shades of black, but it was hopeless. There was nothing. Whoever had been spying on him was probably long gone by now. In any case, Zefer was too excited to worry about anybody else watching him – the most important thing was that he had the book and that he could spend the whole night poring over it. Whoever else had touched these secret pages, they could not have understood their significance or the meaning of these lines. Zefer had spent years of his life without even daring to dream that this night would come.

  2: FRESH AIR

  It had all been a bit of an anti-climax. He had written up his report two weeks ago, rolling it into a perfect tube and shooting it down one of the funnels into the intricate system of pressurised pipes that served as a communication system in the librarium. The valve had hissed open and sucked down the message, and then clicked shut with a satisfied clunk. The passage of the paper tube could just b
e discerned as it hissed and thumped through a series of other hidden valves in the complicated pipe network until it vanished into the invisible depths of the system. After a few seconds, a scrap of paper had been spat out of the little slot next to the funnel. It was his receipt, completed with the printed signature of Princess Gwentria herself, together with a friendly note telling him that he would have a response as soon as possible, if a response was considered necessary.

  Zefer was absolutely sure that his report justified a response. He had never been so certain about anything in his whole life. How often did his superiors in the Historical Research Section receive genuinely innovative reports based on newly discovered primary sources? If they were ever going to receive a paper tube that required a response, it would be this one.

  But nothing seemed to happen. For the first few days, Zefer had been so excited about the prospect of the response that he had been completely unable to work. He had simply sat at his seat, staring at the message funnel, smiling fixedly and waiting for the little chime to sound and for the slot to hiss open. But nothing had happened and Zefer had pretended to go about his business in a disinterested manner, finding any number of excuses to pause and stare at the message funnel, as though only casually interested in whether anything popped out of it or not.

  After a week, he was getting a little frantic. One night, after everyone else had gone home, Zefer abandoned his usual trip to the seventy-third floor and crept back to his daily work-station. He prodded and probed the message funnel, holding the valve open with his stylus whilst peering into the dark recesses within. The following morning, he sent a tube off down to the maintenance department to request that somebody should be sent to check that his message funnel was functioning properly. A couple of hours later, the valve had hissed open and a dirty brown roll of paper was ejected into the receptacle. Picking it up and sniffing at it gingerly, Zefer was fairly sure that this was not the response that he had been waiting for. When he unrolled it, he saw that it contained only four poorly penned words: Seems to work fine.

  Finally, after three more days, Zefer looked up from his work at the delicate sound of a chime. The funnel hissed disgruntledly and out popped a pristine white tube sporting the little blue crest of the Ko’iron on the seal that held it together. It was of the kind used only by officials and curators of the Historical Research Section.

  Zefer just stared at it, hardly believing his eyes and not daring to let his arm reach out and take the message. He pretended not to be interested for a few minutes. Instead of rushing over to open the message, he shuffled some papers around his desk and moved his stylus from one position to another, pretending to check which was the most efficient arrangement.

  When he could contain himself no longer, he half stumbled and half tripped over to the message intake and reverently lifted out the little white tube. Checking over both of his shoulders to ensure that he wasn’t being observed, he carefully secreted it into the loose sleeve of his shapeless grey jacket.

  That evening, he virtually ran up the winding staircase to the privacy of the seventy-third floor, where he leapt into his chair and tugged the little tube out of his sleeve in a single, smooth movement. He slid his fingers under the seal and opened the roll, closing his eyes and pressing his nose down against the paper as he smoothed it out with his hands.

  It smelt strangely familiar. With his nose still only millimetres above the paper, he opened one eye and peered at the text in trepidation. The eye bulged as it registered what was written on the page and Zefer threw back his head in a fit of vented disbelief.

  It wasn’t a response at all.

  The group in the corner were beyond blind drunk. They had gone through blind and come out the other side with big, bold splashes of colour all over their field of vision. They were colourfully drunk and irritatingly loud. And they were not making friends.

  By far the loudest of the group was sitting confidently on the back of a chair with her feet on its seat and her back to the wall. Her dirty blue dreadlocks thrashed around her intricately tattooed head like a storm of snakes as she yelled and laughed at the story of an older woman seated opposite her. The older woman’s back was facing the interior of the room, so Triar could only catch glimpses of the wrinkled skin of her studded and pierced face as she turned her head to include the rest of the group in her narrative.

  From his place at the bar, Triar counted fourteen other Escher gang members in the saloon of The Breath of Fresh Air. They were from a local branch-gang of House Escher called The Coven – named after the unapologetic witch by whom it was led. Only six of them were at the table with the raucous group, but the others were as easy to spot as hellfire in a dark room. Triar had marked them as soon as he had walked in the door, making a mental note of their number and position, just in case there was trouble later. There was always trouble later.

  He was watching the corner-table through the mirror over the bar, taking occasional glances up from his drink and peering out from under the folds of his heavy hood. He was pretty sure that the drunken women had no idea that they were being watched – or, at least, no idea that he wasn’t just another man gawping at their immodesty. Enveloped in his bright blue cloak, even with his back to them, it would not take a genius to work out that he was a Cawdor ganger, but the ladies were drunk beyond such colour-recognition. Given his location in this part of Hive City, they should also have realised that he was from House Cawdor’s evangelical local gang, The Salvationists.

  ‘That’s them,’ said the man standing next to him, sloshing the remains of his pungent drink around in the bottom of a cup.

  ‘Really?’ questioned Triar sarcastically, turning his tarnished silver mask to the black-cloaked agent at the bar. ‘I would never have guessed.’

  ‘You pay me for information,’ hissed the informant, his visor glinting slightly with a hint of blue in the inconstant light. A little red snake tattooed under one eye twitched irritably. ‘I am merely providing it.’ The man nodded his head into a vague bow and then turned to leave. There was obvious false-modesty in his manner.

  The Delaque may be the finest spies in all Hive Primus, thought Triar as he watched the black cape slip between the jostle of other patrons and out of the door, but they are not noted for their wit.

  Following the figure of the retreating spy in the mirror, Triar noted the spread of blue hoods throughout the Fresh Air with satisfaction. Here and there the metals of their masks glinted with understated menace, and Triar knew that he had manoeuvred well this evening. The neutrals in the bar were also beginning to realise that something was going down, and one or two had stopped drinking and were starting to look from one blue cape to the next and then at the women in the corner, doing the sums. The wiser amongst them were already finishing their drinks and quietly filing out of the door.

  The Breath of Fresh Air was an unusual establishment. At first glance it looked like a genius-stroke of planning. Outside its main doors was a huge, four-bladed fan in the junction of three enormous ventilation shafts. It was the only fan in this area of Hive City, and thus the only source of even remotely fresh air, which made it an extremely valuable site. The Fresh Air was full all day and all night, with half of its patrons more excited about drinking in the fresh air than the crude liquor.

  However, the genius of the site also bordered on insanity. The fan was the biggest point of contention between three separate gangs that held territory along each of the ventilation pipes that fed it. Gangers from all three would frequent the Fresh Air, which brought in a great deal of money. But with the gangers came tension, broken bottles and occasional skirmishes, which cost a great deal of money.

  The proprietor was a tiny man, not more than a metre tall. He only had one eye, but never wore a patch – he liked to watch people staring into the open socket with his other eye. He told everyone that his growth was stunted by the potency of the liquor that he distilled in the smoky backrooms
of the Fresh Air. For some strange reason, this seemed to make people want to drink even more of it, so Squatz prided himself on his rare psychological insight.

  Perhaps Squatz’s real insight was the realisation that the Hive City gangers would drink in The Breath of Fresh Air rather than in the safer, gang-owned establishments inside their own territories. Squatz knew that the most important thing for all the gangs was to be seen to be unafraid of each of the others. His bar was the perfect, neutral venue for such posturing, and the strategic importance of its location gave everyone the excuse they needed to be there. The money he made more than compensated for the occasional damages. Besides, most of the real violence took place outside in the public space in front of the great fan so that everyone could watch the fun. In the end, Squatz had realised that the three-way competition over the site was a better guarantee of its security than the patronage of any single gang might have been. He was one of a very small number of genuinely inter-gang institutions.

  ‘Take it outside,’ said Squatz, walking along the counter of the bar to refill Triar’s cup from a grubby looking bottle. Standing on the bar, he could look levelly into Triar’s masked face.

  ‘I’m sure that I don’t know what you mean,’ replied Triar, smiling invisibly behind the shimmering silver mask that twisted around his face like a metallic skin.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ retorted Squatz, the opaque bottle poised to pour as the ugly little man waited for some sign of acknowledgement from Triar. But the silver mask just stared implacably back into his face, and Squatz decided to pour the drink anyway.